Return to It's a Mystery!

Subjects Arts & Humanities Science Special Education

Grades K-2 3-5

Brief Description Combine language arts and forensic science activities for an effective elementary unit on mysteries. Objectives Students will identify the elements of a mystery. review mystery stories. write their own mysteries. engage in forensic science experiments related to mysteries. Keywords mystery, writing, detective Materials Needed mystery video that is age appropriate variety of mystery stories paper and pencils materials to make and bind books (if desired) materials for selected science activities Lesson Plan In her unit Whodunnit?, Susan Seagraves presents several activities that she uses to create an effective and entertaining learning experience about mysteries. The language arts activities begin with mystery reading and end with students writing original mystery stories and binding them as books. There are also many forensic science activities such as making lip prints and shoe prints that require various simple materials. Assessment Seagraves uses rubrics to evaluate the science activities and monitors class participation in the other activities. She evaluates the writing activities by examining the elaboration of sentences and ideas, originality of the story, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Lesson Plan Source Mrs. Seagraves' QUEST Class and Thematic Units Submitted By Cara Bafile National Standards LANGUAGE ARTS: English GRADES K - 12 NL-ENG.K-12.1 Reading for Perspective NL-ENG.K-12.2 Reading for Understanding NL-ENG.K-12.4 Communication Skills NL-ENG.K-12.5 Communication Strategies NL-ENG.K-12.6 Applying Knowledge SCIENCE GRADES K - 4 NS.K-4.1 Science as Inquiry NS.K-4.2 Physical Science NS.K-4.7 History and Nature of Science GRADES 5 - 8 NS.5-8.1 Science as Inquiry NS.5-8.2 Physical Science NS.5-8.7 History and Nature of Science Click to return to this week's Lesson Planning article, It's a Mystery! 02/14/2003